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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Typing or Automaticity and the Italian Octopus

The manual Royal typewriter in my basement is in pretty good
shape although it needs a new ribbon and some dusting off. It had sat in my
late grandmother’s garage until last year, unused for the past thirty or
possibly fifty years. It was last week that my seven year old took an interest
in the typewriter. She pounded the keys, asked me how to load paper, and finally,
after mastering the carriage return, turned to me and gasped, “Oh! This is not like
a computer.”

Just wait until I show
you an old Walkman, I thought.

I was a bridge to the technology of yesteryear. Not only did I know how to work the old
typewriter, I had memories of its not so distant cousins: the snazzy new electric
typewriter my brother took to college and the oddly shaped word processor my
freshmen year roommate brought with her from New Jersey, a machine I thought
only “authors” had, whose black screen glowed with green type.

The one relative constant, generally speaking, and the
reason my daughter felt a kinship to the typewriter if not an understanding of
its mechanical use, is the QWERTY keyboard.

At school, she’s learning to type on a Mac, with the help of
an online program out of England
featuring a talking donkey and Italian octopus.

I surveyed
a few dozen friends and blog readers and discovered that many of us didn’t
learn to type until high school.

We learned on manual or “electric typewriters with blank
keys.” One reader had typing with “a
weird little old lady who taught summer school. I kept fainting it was so hot.”
Another with a teacher who “had the most monotone voice on the planet.” Some
teachers had students take tests blindfolded. One person practiced at home with
a tape recording his father made, “…. I sat at the dining room table and
practiced on a typewriter while I listened.”

Nobody said learning to type was the most thrilling
experience of his or her life, but many said it proved to be vitally important.
(There was one experience that contained some giddiness: the reader who took
typing at Princeton High with some senior boys whose band, Blues Traveler, was
about to become famous.)

Most respondents 17 to 25 took typing in elementary and
middle school. Although they defined themselves as proficient at typing, when
asked to describe how they use a keyboard all but a few selected the answer: I
use my own method and do not have to look at the keys. Compare this with an
almost unanimous “I use the “home keys”
and type without looking at the keys” from those over 30.

I did not survey five year olds. But moving to this age
group, it is fair to say many are using computers and iPads at home and
at school. Will the majority have the
opportunity to learn how to touch type?

It’s an important question, as Anne Trubek points out in a
2011 post, “Out
of Touch with Typing” on MIT’s Technology Review.

“Does it matter how we type? Yes. Touch typing allows
us to write without thinking about how we are writing, freeing us to focus on
what we are writing, on our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive
automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or
awareness. Automaticity takes aburden
off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking.
(Other forms of cognitive automaticity include driving a car, riding a bike and
reading—you're not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, right?) When
we type without looking at the keys, we are multi-tasking, our brains free to
focus on ideas without having to waste mental resources trying to find the
quotation mark key. We can write at the speed of thought.”

Trubek says some schools are dropping keyboard instruction
because they believe kids arrive having already learned to type. But knowing how to get around a keyboard
doesn’t mean touch typing or typing with accuracy and speed.

I spoke with a parent of a sixth grader who said her son exemplified
the self-taught typist who’d never had formal instruction at school. She watched as he labored over typing a
report. Finally, she said, she broke down and typed it for him.

She wouldn’t have helped, she told me, “If I didn’t know for
a fact that ever other mother was doing the same thing.”

If you have a chance,
Anne Trubek’s article and the comments after it on Technology Review is well worth reading.
She mentions the “duel” in 1889 from which emerged the winning “home keys”
system of typing. And the comments afterward propose fixes to what she calls
the sacrifice of cognitive automaticity we’re making with our shifting
keyboards and lack of instruction. Some suggest voice recognition; others say
revamp the QWERTY keyboard. The roadblock to that? Those among us who spent
hundreds of hours learning how to use it.

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About Me

Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff writes about parenthood, education and life and contributes to The Washington Post's On Parenting, Yahoo Parenting, HuffPost Education, Getting Smart, as well as Broadway World. She is also a contributor to the book, Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning.